OMD's Journal—Investing August '22: Post-Mortem on Sea Limited, Selling Discipline, Less is More in Investing Strategy...

Hello! This month’s Investing Journal focuses on reflections after selling out of Sea Limited a small position I held for a short two years. Despite how immaterial it was, it stirred some greater thoughts on my investment philosophy for the future.

Reflections of August

It was a month with a decent amount of trading. It involved selling out of a core position, adding to existing positions and even initiating new ones as well. It was also a month of turning over far more rocks looking at companies from all sizes from $40m in market cap to $50b. 

I found myself opening dozens of tabs (many of which still remain open today) from all the ideas I started exploring, got distracted and started going through adjacent ideas. An idea inventory management system is something I’ll need to build back up and I’m noodling on what that should look like. 

Before, it used to be very organic where I would go deep into a company for a period and I would take haphazard notes here and there. Afterwards, I would decide to buy it or move on with most of the notes lost in the depths somewhere. Reorganizing my investment journal around specific company notes, portfolio, and philosophy might be a better way of organizing them. 

This might sound simple and I guess it is. But to do it the “right way” I will have to sit down and type out everything I’ve accumulated in my head and vomit it out on to a page with some form of thought about what I’m saying. This will all be quite the time commitment, something I’ll have to schedule in, and it hasn’t been a priority yet. But I can feel the debt of information building up in the back of my mind. 

One such build up has been exiting my position in Sea Limited and a desire to process this out. The post-mortem process for me isn’t all about the business with some quantitative metrics on when I should’ve sold or bought, etc. Rather, it’s about digesting what I’ve felt, learned and want to do going forward. 

Post Mortem: Sea Limited

This was a small position for the portfolio. At the business’s top share price in Winter of 2021 it was still a <10% position and by the time of the sale it was less than 5% as a result of new capital and the stock price declining since the peak.